[SilverBirch]

I think this is almost a case of a company being too successful. The general pattern is that you grow, you raise money, you grow, you raise money, you grow, your IPO. At each stage of growth there's a different investor. Initially you have Angels and YC style places. Then you have various stages of VC, then you finally have the public market.

What normally happens is that you become too big and that's when VCs step out of the way, you IPO and everyone takes their gains. But in the case of stripe you have $100Bn company that the VCs will still happily plough money into. So there's no reason to IPO. You can get all the liquidity you need privately. On top of that, Stripe doesn't really need capital, they aren't some uber buying market share with loss making. They are real SAAS, they can scale and see a drop in their earnings:cost ratio.